Active wallets, holding wallets, and why neither adds up

An active wallet is an address that sent or received in the period. A holding wallet is an address with a positive balance at the end of it. They answer different questions and they are counted over different rows.

Active wallets include one more population since 25 September 2026: addresses on the Brazilian settlement rail, which receive mints, burn them, and never transact with another address, so a count built on transfers never sees them. Each such address touched by a mint or a burn in the period is added to the figure for its token, currency and chain. Because a settlement address has no transfer on its whole history, the two sets cannot overlap, which is the one case here where two wallet counts may be added.

Neither figure is additive, in either direction, and this is the thing most likely to mislead. An address holding two tokens is one address, so a currency total is not its tokens added up. An address active in four weeks of a month is one monthly active wallet, not four, so a month is not its weeks added up. Every level and every period is counted separately, which is why they are published pre-aggregated rather than left to a filter to compute.

Balances include mints, burns and all nine registered treasury and reserve addresses, which is the opposite of how settled value is measured. The treasury and zero-address rules exist to stop issuance being counted as economic flow, and that is a claim about movement. A holder count is a question about stock, and a treasury address does hold what it holds.

An address counts as a holder above one millionth of a unit. Below that, residue left by thousands of partial transfers reads as a wallet.

Holding wallets are published monthly only. Carrying a balance forward day by day across 283,000 addresses costs considerably more than the extra resolution is worth.